American philosopher George Santayana once wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Santanya’s dictum could easily be applied in the United States these days, where many have forgotten the story of how separation of church and state became one of the nation’s core values.

The problem arises because of recent historical revisionism. According to this view, the Founders never intended to separate religion and government in the United States. In fact, the concept is supposedly an invention of modern secularists. The most current update extends this thesis, depicting the concept entering U.S. law in response to anti-Catholic bigotry during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1

This strain of revisionism is wrong. It fails to understand that the concept of separation—if not always the precise word—has been fully appreciated in theory and practice among Americans for centuries. Furthermore, it does serious injustice to early American Christians who struggled to create a barrier between government and religion to protect freedom of conscience.

To revisionists, the Founding Generation assumed that civil promotion of Judeo-Christian religion was necessary for the survival of the Republic. Thus, the United States started as a Christian nation. For evidence, affirmations of religion's value by the nation's Founding Fathers are often cited. However, other evidence that denies the alleged religious foundations of the Republic tends to get overlooked.

For example, when George Washington signed a treaty with Tripoli in 1796, five years after ratification of the First Amendment, he denied that the U.S. government was founded on Christianity. "As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, . . ." the treaty reads in part, "it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."2

Washington was not alone. One searches in vain through the U.S. Constitution, the basis of federal government, for foundations based in Christianity. Indeed, the document never mentions or even alludes to God. In an era when crowned heads of Europe routinely claimed a divine right to rule, the point was obvious. In the U.S. government, authority derives not from any church or religious creed, or from God, but from "the people"—as the preamble plainly states.

Far from calling for the promotion of religion, the Constitution actually demonstrates sensitivity to the danger of pressuring consciences. Article 2, section 1, includes a provision that permits Quakers, who read James 5:12 literally, to "affirm" rather than "swear" the oath of office after election to the presidency. The same section permits atheists to take the presidential oath in all honesty, since it does not mention God. Furthermore, Article 6 forbids religious tests for officeholders. The U.S. Constitution is blind to the religion of its citizens—whether Catholic, Buddhist, Quaker, Seventh-day Adventist, Baptist, Methodist, or atheist.

However, the American tradition of separation goes back much further than the Constitution. The tradition even predates Thomas Jefferson, who customarily gets credit for coining the term "wall of separation."

Its originator was Roger Williams, a seventeenth-century Protestant.3 So devoted was Williams to God that his contemporaries described him as "God-intoxicated." Williams was a Puritan clergyman who emigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. He spoke his piece, which disagreed with authorities in the Protestant colony, went on trial for unorthodox views, and was forced to flee in the dead of winter.

The colony that Williams established in 1636, Rhode Island, is the stuff of legend. Unlike Massachusetts, which whipped, banished, and hung religious dissenters, Rhode Island extended full religious freedom to everyone—including Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and atheists. The colony had no religious taxes, no church establishment, and no religious tests for office holding. It even exempted nonbelievers from swearing the oath "so help me God," which, in Williams’s view, would have been meaningless to them and contrary to God’s ways.

Williams believed that God communicates with humans through the Holy Spirit. Even the slightest coercion that interfered with this process displeased God. "Rape of the soul" was the term Williams used to describe forcing nonbelievers to observe and participate in religious rituals.

To Williams, "a hedge or wall of separation" was needed to guard between "the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world."4 As a result, Rhode Island’s charter guaranteed "full liberty in religious concernments." Later colonial charters for New Jersey, Carolina, and Pennsylvania included wording or concepts nearly identical.

The tradition that Williams started endured as a major Baptist landmark, elaborated and expanded during the Revolutionary era by Isaac Backus, one of the Baptists’ leading spokesmen. Government and religion, Backus warned in 1773, "are distinct in their nature and ought never to be confounded together."5 It is no coincidence that the Baptists, the fastest-growing U.S. denomination at that time, played a major role in efforts to ratify the First Amendment.

Some revisionists quote Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French traveler who visited the United States in the 1830s. In the introduction to his report, Democracy in America, he wrote, "One cannot establish the reign of liberty without that of mores, and mores cannot be firmly founded without beliefs." However, de Tocqueville also believed that religion best operates free of government involvement. Religion, he continued, "realizes that its sway is all the better established because it relies only on its own powers and rules men's hearts without external support."6

During his visit, de Tocqueville interviewed the "faithful of all communions," including clergymen, especially Roman Catholic priests.

They all agreed with each other except about details; all thought that the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state. I have no hesitation in stating that throughout my stay in America I met nobody, lay or cleric, who did not agree about that.7

What de Tocqueville witnessed in the 1830s was a tradition already two centuries old. The high wall of separation was not the creation of modern secularists or anti-Catholic bigots. It arose in the seventeenth century to safeguard the workings of the Holy Spirit and the sanctity of the conscience, soon entered the nation’s cultural and legal bloodstream, and is reflected today in the founding document of the United States thanks to the wisdom of the Framers.

All Americans can still be proud of that tradition and of the Framers' accomplishment.

Notes and References

1. See, most notably, the prolific writings of David Barton, and, more recently, Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).
2. "Treaty with Tripoli, 1796, Article XI," quoted in William Addison Blakely, ed., American State Papers and Related Documents on Freedom in Religion (Washington, D.C., 1947), 311, 312.
3. Our main source for Williams’s life is Edwin S. Gaustad, Liberty of Conscience: Roger Williams in America (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1991).
4. Ibid., 43.
5. Ibid., 203-4. The quote comes from An Appeal to the Public (Boston, 1773).
6. Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayers, trans. George Lawrence (New York, 2000), 17, 47.
7. Ibid., 295.

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